Give me a sign.
The other day I was driving in Plattsburgh, in a hurry as always and a little flustered, and I came to a big, busy intersection.
I visit Plattsburgh regularly and had a general sense for where I needed to be, but I needed a little guidance.
Yet when I looked at the streets going every which direction, there were no signs.
Literally not a single street name. No indication of where I was or which streets led where.
I know, I know — it’s a sign of burgeoning middle age, but I notice this kind of breakdown more and more often.
I spent a lot of time in a hospital recently in the Midwest caring for a sick relative. It was a huge, sprawling place.
There were plenty of signs leading to the cafeteria, at least at first, but then inexplicably they just stopped. Two complicated turns away from the restaurant — nothing. You were on your own.
The lack of adequate way-markers may seem like a fussy, Andy Rooney-esque preoccupation, but in our hectic, fast-paced, heterogeneous world, clear, informative signage is crucial.
Take Windows 8, the baffling new operating system that has taken over my computer.
Again and again, the program dumps me into places where I don’t want to be, where there are no easily graspable clues about how to move forward or go back.
How did I get here? How do I get out? How do I make it stop doing this awful thing it’s doing?
Whoever designed this virtual world obviously understood the roadmap, the matrix of prompts and possible decisions and clues. But they didn’t leave anything like enough breadcrumbs for average users like myself.
I suspect that the problem lies mostly with the technical people, the engineers and programmers and architects and planners who are responsible for designing our increasingly built environment.
They are systems experts and, bless their hearts, they make the modern world possible.
From the baffling left-side right-side parking system in New York City to the stop-don’t stop signage at the US-Canada border, they’re trying to guide the mice through the maze of infrastructure needed to handle tens of millions of people.
And they study the lines on the diagram until they seem like common sense. How could anyone be confused by this stuff?
They understand, for example, that you’re not supposed to stop at the major intersection leading into Saranac Lake from Lake Placid. So they don’t bother putting up a sign indicating as much.
Why would you need a sign telling you not to stop?
But to average drivers, it looks like the kind of intersection where you should stop. Which means that about a hundred times a day people do just that.
They come to a complete stop in the middle of the highway, meaning bottle-necked traffic and the risk of accidents.
This being the complicated world that it is, there’s actually a science for all this, called semiotics.
Which refers not only to actual signs — like the street sign on your corner — but to all the real and virtual signage that we use to communicate.
In an increasingly global world, how do we signal to one-another across the transoms of cultural difference?
How will a company tell me how to assemble my new lawn mower, in a way that will also make sense to a guy in Kuala Lumpur?
How will more complex cultural products, from the nutritional content of Big Macs to the different offerings in your 401k plan, be labeled and identified, so that amateurs can sort them out and make informed decisions?
My guess is that technical people will get better at this. For all its stumbles and missteps, the art of the user interface gets better and better.
Apple has offered up a vision of a world where AI-type programs like Siri will offer us a huge assist with these challenges.
Sounds beautiful. In theory, we’ll just tell our smart device what we want and it will read the signs for us.
But there are still a lot of kinks, a lot of bugs in the system — and I’m guessing a lot of frustration and dead ends in our future.
The last time I used the super-smart GPS navigation system in my truck, the cheerful, vaguely Swedish sounding female voice guided me step by step onto a dead-end logging road. Thanks, Helga.
So how about you? What are the missing, or unclear, or downright misleading signs that muddle your world? Is it that off-ramp on the Northway that doesn’t warn you that there’s no on-ramp to get you back on the highway again?
Or maybe it’s those baffling instructions in the voting booth that force you to rethink your faith in democracy? Comments welcome below.
I have a sign over my shop entry:
” pay attention ”
my brother has one on his truck visor:
” travel alone “
It seems that with every iteration of software the engineers feel they must improve the interface to make it more “intuitive”. What they uniformly fail to understand is that there is nothing as intuitive as what you already know even if it isn’t the most efficient from an engineering point of view.
I used to know a writing professor who claimed that the biggest need we have is competent technical writers, people who both understand technology and can explain it clearly to the average individual. He said that applied to all levels of technology from assembling the new toy you bought your kid for Christmas to the most complex computer program. Sadly, in my experience, we seem to be going the other way. Manuals are becoming more cryptic (their illusory volume is the result of including 47 languages) or often just disappearing altogether. Software manuals are now generally PDF files or on-line, both options the accessing of which assume a level of sophistication the user may not have.
Brian, the problem with software and just about everything else is you have people constantly fixing what isn’t broke.
We have been fixing education for over 50 years and just look at what that has done for us.
Why do we do this?
In some cases there are actual fixes. But often what is going on is people wanting to justify their existence and sell “the new and improved product.”
I totally agree with you on the lack of street signs in many locations, especially when you are not totally familiar with the area.
I do have one question. Why did you “upgrade” to Windows 8?
I was recently reading in Time where Apple plans on eliminating icons in its next operating system, which are called in the trade “skeuomorphic elements,” things such as a wastebasket looking like a wastebasket.
The article in Time mentions how Windows 8 has caught a lot of flack from people who say it isn’t user friendly, and how Apple seems to be chasing Microsoft.
I’ll stick with Windows 7.
“They understand, for example, that you’re not supposed to stop at the major intersection leading into Saranac Lake from Lake Placid. So they don’t bother putting up a sign indicating as much.
Why would you need a sign telling you not to stop?
But to average drivers, it looks like the kind of intersection where you should stop. Which means that about a hundred times a day people do just that.”
You must be referring to that intersection near Pontiac bay where folks turning left are always stopping. Folks turning right on the side closest to the lake also stop sometimes for some reason, despite the fact that it seems less like a “stop” in that direction??? I saw it once this weekend.
Let’s face it that is a wacky intersection. If you are not from around there it does look like a spot you should be stopping. I would wager that more people stop than not. I wonder how many times a day they hear a car horn at that bank?
Sounds like nothing interesting is happening in politics right now.
Brian,
You might like the series by Julia Turner on signs, particularly this one on “wayfinding” in Penn Station.
http://www.slate.com/articles/life/signs/2010/03/lost_in_penn_station.html
Is this a political blog? I better get out of here. I hate politics!
People stopping where they don’t have to. They are using their knowledge and experience in an unfamiliar situation, not a bad thing, except for the impatient people behind them.
My most problematic issue is with maps that list a road number but signage carries the local road name and no number. And then there is our road which has one name for the 1st 275 feet then the name changes at the town line and is good for next mile and a half. Could have saved buying some signs if the towns would have agreed.
I guess maybe it is a good thing environmentally. Technology is making it so we don’t need any signs. The car should know when it needs to stop and when it is safe to go and it certainly should know via GPS where it needs to take me in reference to where it is. I can just sit in there and watch You Tube videos till I get where I need to go! No more drunk or texting while driving!
Paul says:
June 3, 2013 at 2:47 pm
I guess maybe it is a good thing environmentally. Technology is making it so we don’t need any signs. The car should know when it needs to stop and when it is safe to go and it certainly should know via GPS where it needs to take me in reference to where it is. I can just sit in there and watch You Tube videos till I get where I need to go! No more drunk or texting while driving!
But would the car know to swerve out of the way of a road crossing squirrel? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FieGqyLJYHc
Jim Bullard says:
June 3, 2013 at 8:59 am
It seems that with every iteration of software the engineers feel they must improve the interface to make it more “intuitive”. What they uniformly fail to understand is that there is nothing as intuitive as what you already know even if it isn’t the most efficient from an engineering point of view.
I agree. I hated it when Vista came out. I knew Microsoft Office Suite very good until then. It may have been more intuitive to new users (maybe, as the ribbon format of Vista could give some users sensory overload), but to someone already proficient in Office, it was a pain to have to learn something from scratch when the previous Office just worked fine.
When I was a kid, and I was pretty young – maybe 10 or 11, my folks told me “if you get lost just go downhill until you find a stream. then follow the stream and sooner or later it will come to a road, then just follow the road until you know where you are.”
Same thing with computers except easier. If you get lost, shut it off. Then turn it on again and you’ll know where you are. Oh, and get an Apple product.
You forgot to mention international symbols. Lots of symbols have the “don’t do this” slash. I get the message of slash over a cigarette. And maybe I (sort of) grasp the prohibition against holding a coffee cup under a dripping faucet.
But why am I forbidden to point my index finger downward? And what’s with the slash over a little man lying on his side, waves below and three raindrops above?
With the help of Google, I did find one that might help at that Saranac Lake intersection. It pictures a man thrusting out a flat palm that clearly conveys “STOP!” The picture has a bold “do not do this” slash.